9/08/2009 @ 12:00AM

I Was Like...

It has been a long hard summer of incessant irritation. The warm weather seems to bring out in the young a tendency to natter away loudly about themselves. In parks, on the subway or bus, on television or radio, several times a day somewhere within earshot a teenager in full flow would utter the words, “I was like ,” followed by a little pause and then an accelerated torrent of more words oft accompanied by a cartoonish facial expression.

For years, as the linguistic virus has gained ever more widespread currency among schoolgirls, college kids and, oddly, a certain type of self-delighted urban gay youth, I’ve worked hard to develop an internal auto-delete setting to block it out whenever I hear the phrase being launched. This summer, as the months wore on, I decided instead to face it head on, to listen extra hard. My mission: to neutralize its noisome irritant effect by diagnosing the underlying synaptic clot that triggers it. Why has an entire generation of kids caught this tick? What function does it serve and why them–that is, why this last decade or two of pre-teen to post-college age victims?

“I was like … wow,” said a tween-aged girl with badly applied make-up waving a cigarette in her underage fingers. She was like, a sharp pause, then, “wow,” with a sudden facial grimace proffered in tandem, a kind of mimed illustration. Here then was the first clue: the “like” part served as the equivalent of quotation marks to set up what followed, the mutually recognized moment.

A few days later, in a nearby park, my ears perked up at a similar formulation by a slightly older protagonist, “It was like … eek, we’re all gonna die,” accompanied by the subject raising both hands in a mock gesture of horror then clasping them to her head. Here was another clue, indeed a cluster of clues that one could coherently decipher: The little shriek came directly from any number of horror movies we’d all seen, as did the phrase that went with it. That physical gesture one could track all the way back to Edvard Munch’s work “The Scream,” and all the film and TV images that lazily copied it from silent movies onward.

Within a few weeks of concentrated observation it was possible to conclude the following: Saying “like” was a symptom of the television age, indeed could not be possible without an entire generation sharing a series of stock images they could cite to each other knowingly, with the full confidence of being understood. In another time or culture, it might be a famous newspaper headline or a phrase from a poem or song that would serve the same way. In each case, the narrator would expect an instant bonding effect on the listeners. In the television age, though, other nuances come attached.

For sure, it means a generation of kids now resort to clichéd TV moments as a kind of shorthand language, one that reduces the role of verbal language, so that the mind leaps from visual image to image while words become mere captions. But there’s also a suggestion of irony, of comic absurdity, in the interplay and even perhaps a little eruption of tittering. Now, I asked myself, why should that be so? Wherein lies the humor, considering the utter banality of the thought, the fact that it’s been reproduced a zillion times. It was, I realized, a function not of the gesture being funny, or not only that, but of the implicit invitation in the quotation marks, “come enter the trivial television world with me and let us be silly together.”

As I say this, I think of other cultures similarly affected–Turkey, Italy, Japan–where a certain baby talk intonation has entered the speech of girls who wish to convey their unadulterated girlishness. Conversely, I think of cultures where commercial television has made few inroads, such as Iran or Yemen with sour mullahs and imams as the commonest visual references. I think, for instance, of that moment in the recent Sasha Baron Cohen movie where Bruno unfolds his oily vowels while wearing a sleeveless top that shows his waxed arms to interview the Palestinian “terrorist”–the celebrity-obsessed, entertainment-saturated identity confronting a far older, flintier type of pre-ironic identity.

“I was like … yaaay,” said a young gay guy to his pals in a diner. Why didn’t he say “I was overjoyed,” or if it must be visual, why not “I was over the moon”? Too many syllables? Perhaps. But there’s also an implied message: “I was happy in precisely the televisual way, with all my limbs leaping just so, in a cramped wristy way that fits inside a frame, is contained in a narrative that we all recognize–all of us from a certain infantile, fun-loving, trivia-toting generation.” On one side, the implication goes, are the square grown-up gravitas-mongers, and on the other there’s us, the merry band of irresponsible youngsters with our Masonic code of silly boob-tube references.

I asked my daughter why girls, in particular, tend to premise their delivery with “like,” with the suggestion constantly that whatever they think is extracted from something else–not just another similar thought but from a narrative story or a dramatic moment. She’s a very intelligent, indeed mature, girl of 12 with a deceptive font of wisdom, a great reader and a deep thinker–yet she’s a carrier of the scourge. “It’s because well, it’s like girls don’t want to just say what they think. I mean, they’re not as confident as boys when they give their opinions. It’s like, it’s … you’re saying something that other people are saying. It’s not just you.” Exactly so.

Yet the torrents of speech that her girl friends exchange, though laced with staccato “likes,” seem to show no palpable sense of insecurity. There’s a continuous blurry sense of play-acting or role-playing–normal for kids trying on selves–only the roles reference a caricaturish scenario of sudden loud voicings, sitcom elocutions and cut-out figures talking oddly. People are wacky, weird or creepy. Not just creepy but CREEPY! As in horror movies or, even more cross-referentially, their favorite tween-girl television character imitating horror movie creepiness.

It is not a matter, ultimately, of losing the line between cable television and reality so much as it’s a matter of all reality turning into cable television. Everybody acting as if they’re acting. As Woody Allen once said, “art imitates life and life imitates bad television.” One doesn’t know where all this must lead. We are in a genuinely unprecedented era. It’s like … like nothing the world has known, like nothing else … except itself.